The present disclosure generally relates to providing blanked signals and the processing thereof. In particular, the present disclosure, inter alia, relates to an apparatus comprising a blanker configured to provide a plurality of blanked signals, each blanked signal corresponding to a respective correlator channel signal of a plurality of correlator channel signals, the correlator channel signal being obtainable based on the respective blanked signal and a respective signal replica of a plurality of signal replicas, the signal replicas being shifted with respect to each other. Further, the present disclosure relates to a receiver comprising such an apparatus. Moreover, the disclosure relates to a method comprising providing a plurality of blanked signals.
Nowadays, signals are transmitted for a wide range of applications including communication and navigation applications. High performance processing at the receiver side as well as reception quality assessment are crucial to meeting user quality expectations and are therefore intensively investigated. For instance, US 2015/0236751 A1 and EP 2 911 307 A1 disclose techniques to acquire and track a spread-spectrum navigation signal at a receiver. US 2014/0368383 A1 and EP 2 814 197 A1 disclose techniques for determining an amount of noise in a received signal.
Blanking may be applied to modify signal portions, e.g., samples, that are assumed to be afflicted with an excessive amount of interference/noise as they exceed a threshold, for instance by setting them to a fixed value, e.g., 0. It may contribute to reduce the undesirable effects of interference/noise but usually part of the desired signal is lost, meaning sacrificed with the blanking operation. Nevertheless, blanking can help recovering the receiver signal processing performance compared to a scenario in which blanking is not applied.
Improved blanking techniques and apparatuses implementing them are desirable.